


your love should have been an antidote

by queenfizzy



Series: the fun of living (is to make something better) [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Gen, That One Scene With BruceNat Flirting + Steve redux, anyways there's gonna be more in this -verse, brucenat is gonna be onesided, he just wants nat's help again lmao, honestly idk, nat is being her spy self and steve can tell, steve has Big Feelings but also sorta not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-29 05:37:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18772276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queenfizzy/pseuds/queenfizzy
Summary: the first part of my mcu rewrite - vignette style, starting with age of ultron and continuing on.the party roars around them, the three people left at the bar. while everyone else is relaxing, steve watches natasha work, smiling and flirting and charming bruce. the sinking feeling in his chest grows. but bruce doesn’t see anything wrong, flirting nervously back and watching with wide eyes as natasha walks away.or; the lies we tell to keep others safe. steve just wants his friend back and to go look for bucky, bruce just wants some semblance of normalcy and searches for it in a relationship, and natasha... well, natasha always does her job.





	your love should have been an antidote

**Author's Note:**

> part of my _the fun of living (is to make something better)_ verse, a soft rewrite of the mcu told through vignettes, starting with age of ultron and continuing on through the universe. lot's of introspection here! hope you guys like it :)

on a usual day, steve enjoys watching natasha work. he finds it interesting, seeing how easily she winds people around her little finger, drags them into the webs that give her the name black widow. he likes standing back and watching her slip into someone else’s skin. he usually finds it impressive.

not today.

because today she wasn’t working on a random mark, or some HYDRA bastard who deserved what they got. instead, today - and almost every day for the past several months - natasha’s mark has been bruce banner. and bruce doesn’t deserve the runaround, doesn’t deserve to be lied to and strung along. but hitching him to natasha is the best chance they’ve got to make sure the hulk never hurts anyone if anything happens on a mission. 

steve remembers hearing the news three months ago, holed up somewhere with sam in the ukraine chasing another cold lead. the hulk, hit with some sort of electric bolt that hurt even him. a rampage through a city in thailand; civilians dead. he’d come back a couple weeks later to tony making a secret suit of armor and natasha smiling simpering, girlish smiles at a shell-shocked bruce. the sense of wrongness was so intense that he cornered natasha within a few hours of arrival, sam on his left, both of them fixing her in place with their eyes. 

for a master spy natasha broke quick, but steve chose to see that as her trusting him rather than her playing him.

“tony asked me to,” natasha spoke, losing her soft features, at once back to business, “and i agreed. testing out a theory.”

“what’s the theory?” sam deadpanned, raising an eyebrow.

“stick around for tomorrow and you’ll see,” she said. after a pause, she spoke lowly, glancing around them down the hallway, “i want you guys around to watch my back, in case something goes wrong.”

\---

steve and sam stuck around, at least for one more day. a part of steve was itching to fly out to helsinki to chase down a new lead one of his old SHIELD contacts had sent over, but the other part knew he shouldn’t ditch real life friends to chase down ghost stories.

the next morning tony gathered them all up and they rode the elevator down, down, down, deeper than steve knew the tower went, emerging into a large chamber with white walls and black cameras in the corners. 

“nothing here for you to smash, buddy,” tony grinned, clasping bruce on the shoulder. “you’ll be fine.”

bruce nodded, gulping nervously, taking off his glasses and handing them to natasha. she took them, slipping them into her pocket in one smooth movement before placing a hand on bruce’s shoulder. 

“you’ll be fine,” she promised, smiling softly. she turned, walking steadily after tony towards the observation room that was built into the wall. the rest of them followed, leaving bruce alone, surrounded by nothing but white walls.

once they were all safely in the room, bruce “hulked out”. steve was on guard, but the hulk didn’t do much. tony opened compartments and trap doors with a glowing control panel in front of the window that threw debris into the room. hulk destroyed everything in thrown in, but made no effort to break out. after a while, tony took a deep breath, looking up from his controls to natasha.

“well,” he drawled knuckles white, “guess it’s time for the real test.” 

natasha nodded, stepping forward with her chin set. steve watched carefully but didn’t make any move to stand in. she’d never allow it. he shared a longsuffering look with clint, and both of them readied themselves to jump in at the first sign of danger. but natasha walked confidently across the room, straight at the hulk, without flinching. and for once the hulk didn’t smash, letting her walk unmolested across the floor until she was right in front of him. she said something to the hulk that the mics don’t catch, stroking his hand, and suddenly the green faded. there, stood in the hulk’s place, was bruce. 

silence fell through the cavernous room, no one sure what to say. natasha spoke softly to bruce, smiling at him, touching their foreheads together before turning back to the observation room and locking eyes with steve. he inclined his head back, and that was that. 

he and sam left the same day. natasha stayed behind.

\--

now, months later, he’s standing at the bar watching natasha work on bruce. it’s annoying in various ways, but mostly because it both keeps natasha from joining him in his search for bucky and because it’s reduced her place on the team to the babysitter, and has people treating her accordingly. she’s on the team because she belongs on the team, not because she’s the hulk-wrangler.

still, she’d managed to get the tip-off about the HYDRA base they’d destroyed today even with one hand tied behind her back, so she wasn't just sitting around reading organic chemistry papers with bruce. recently steve had been hoping that things would settle down, bruce would gain some confidence, and natasha wouldn’t need to hang around him all the time. 

the party roars around them, the three people left at the bar. while everyone else is unwinding, steve watches natasha work, smiling and flirting and charming bruce. every second, the sinking feeling in his chest grows. but bruce doesn’t seem to see anything wrong, nervously flirting back and watching with wide eyes as natasha walks away. 

she brushes past steve and they share a look, but then she’s off to another part of the open concept floor plan, probably to keep working somewhere else. it’s like she doesn’t know how to relax. bruce stays at the bar and steve watches as he wilts, the little confidence he’d gained draining out of him as he had time to think.

_fuck_ , steve thinks, but then that reminds him of his slip up earlier, forgetting in the heat of battle in a european winter that it wasn’t the howling commandos around him, flooding the comms, but instead his unsteady coworkers who wouldn’t recognize when he was teasing.

steve shakes himself out of the past, "the past" being both hours ago and years ago, focusing back on bruce. if he ever wants natasha's help on his project again, he needs to help her with hers. her leaving had been part of it, to let bruce have some line to better reel him in later, just like fishing. natasha did it all the time, steve had seen. but bruce was different to her usual marks, and instead of psyching himself up about her he was psyching himself out. steve needed to throw his hat in the ring and help.

steve steels himself, walking over to bruce, acting as if all he wants is a beer and talking to bruce is just a nice bonus. “it’s nice,” he comments, starting slow. he startles bruce at first, steve can tell by the way the man nervously pats down his front and inches away. 

steve sighs mentally. he’s not the fun police. and besides, his one major almost-relationship, which everyone knows about, was with a superior. it’s beyond him why bruce would think he saw anything wrong with a little flirting on the job, but bruce was clearly afraid of a reprimand. 

still, steve presses on - reassuring bruce, congratulating him. “she’s not the most open person.” steve says unsurely, and he feels like laughing, or maybe crying. he’s not made for this.

bruce tries to brush it off, because of course he does. he says it’s just natasha being a flirt, being herself. steve shakes his head. 

“i’ve seen her flirt, up close. this ain’t that.” steve doesn’t lie often, and each word falls like rocks from his lips, but bruce eats them up. steve steps closer, walking down the length of the bar, focusing only on bruce as people pass around them.

“look,” steve says, standing next to bruce. he's not sure what where he’s going with this. steve's still half in the past tonight, apparently, and the next words out of his mouth startle him, “as maybe the world’s leading authority on waiting too long: don’t. you both deserve a win.”

they nod to each other, suddenly awkward, and steve heads past bruce, back to sam and the rest of his old war buddies and maybe even thor if he’s lucky. the place is big and teeming with people, but they managed to carve themselves a little hole off to the side. steve walks slowly through the crowds, maneuvering around industrial furniture made with sleek, techy lines. a sense of wrongness floods through him, but by this long in the twenty-first century, he’s used to it. he knows he doesn’t belong here, but this is where he is.

the same way he doesn’t belong in a spy mission between friends, but that’s where he put himself a minute ago, for some reason. to help. all he ever does is try to help and end up somewhere he doesn’t belong.

“you okay?” sam asks suddenly, clasping him on his shoulder. steve glances up suddenly, not realizing he’d gotten back. he looks around the semicircle of faces, some new, some different (older) but familiar, sequestered off in a little back corner like always. 

steve grins. “yeah, i’m okay,” he grabs sam’s other shoulder, putting them in a strange sort of side hug, and drags him forward to talk to some old war buddies. 

he doesn’t think about how he doesn’t belong, or what natasha’s up to, or where bucky is, or how everything can go wrong. whatever else is going on with the party or with the avengers, he has this. 

and for now, this is enough.


End file.
